A Meditation on Aging and Marriage

We drink coffee and read the Sunday paper in bed. Before I get to the obits, I go downstairs for the churros that we bought yesterday at El Rey Mexican Market. I think what could be better than eating a churro and celebrating not being in the obits myself.            

There are a lot of obits – death notices some people call them – because it is Sunday. My father used to joke, “Why does everyone die on Sunday?” I read the Sunday obits religiously. I look for humor and good works, appreciate people whose dogs are mentioned as having been left behind, and tally up how many people are older than us. Because of our age, our deaths would no longer be considered untimely or premature, although they could be unexpected, which has always been my hope.            

After the churros and the obits, we make our way downstairs to the kitchen to make breakfast from the corned beef hash left from my lunch with a friend. I gently fry two eggs and slip them atop our portions of hash and the eggs are golden and runny. This seems like good fortune to me and moves me to appreciate our lives as retired people in our seventies, and, after having read dozens of obits, that we are alive to eat corned beef hash and eggs.            

We take our dog to the dog park for a run. He is a retired sled dog so he likes to run, stretch out, lope along like a contented mare in a pasture. On the way to the park, it starts raining but I am wearing the $10 raincoat that I bought years ago in Fairbanks so I am not worried. The rain might make walking on the trail hard for my husband though. He is recovering from a bad back flare-up, still building his strength and balance. He walks around the park once very slowly and then sits on a bench to wait while the dog and I do the circuit twice more. I am patient with this, but missing our life from before when we would come back from long walks in the dog park with mud caked on our boots that we’d have to scrape off on the back porch.                       

We have tickets for the baseball game. We take the dog home and drive to the stadium where, despite having paid for the best parking, we end up with a long way to walk. “It’s alright,” my husband says. “It’s a straight shot.” He says this as if walking in a straight line cures the ill, and I guess it is better than meandering.            

The stadium is crowded because it is Sunday and the Brewers are playing the Angels. We pick our way through the crowd, me trying to create a path and my husband using his cane for balance and as a warning symbol to others. He is going slow, he is saying, so people need to be patient. We come to the escalator. My husband tells me it will be alright, this being his usual refrain, but, in my mind, I see him tripping on the first step and being maimed by the rolling stairs. At the top, I worry again that he will trip and fall backward until some young guy in a Brewers jersey catches him.            

We get to the section where our seats are located. At the top of the section, there are folding chairs for handicapped people and we ask the usher if we could possibly sit there so my husband can avoid the stairs to our seats. The usher says no because we need a special ticket. All the seats are empty so I give the usher a lecture about human kindness. Later, around the sixth inning, I walk by and see all the chairs filled. I realize I’d not been kind in my lecture but am too chagrined to apologize.            

Early in the game, our son and his partner come down the row to our seats. My son holds the tickets we bought him for Christmas. His tickets are for the seats my husband and I are sitting in. We compare tickets – his paper tickets and my electronic tickets – and realize they are for the same seats. Meanwhile, the people behind us begin murmuring and I am reminded that they see a rough-looking Hispanic guy and his girlfriend talking to two old White people.            

I reach up to put my hand on my son’s back and then turn to talk to the people behind us. “It’s okay. We’re related.” I don’t know why I need to explain that our son is our son, why I need to reassure the strangers sitting behind us that he may be Hispanic but he’s harmless. It is insulting to him, to us, but it doesn’t matter. It’s reflex after all these years. The people nod but keep watching us, ready for anything that might happen.            

After much discussion, we realize that I’d assumed the tickets that had been downloaded to my phone were for my husband and me but they were duplicates of the paper tickets we’d given our son for Christmas. We laugh about the ushers booting two old people out of their seats when one has a cane. I wait for someone to say, “this is a mistake anyone could make,” but no one does so I say it. The mystery solved, we arrange ourselves in a row made possible by a nice couple moving over two seats. I am glad the people who belonged to the empty seats didn’t come to the game. Maybe they forgot.            

After the game, we slowly work our way out of the stadium. It is raining harder now and our car is far away. I walk ahead of my husband, putting my hand up to stop moving cars so we can pass. It seems endless and trying but in the middle of it, my husband says, “This is as good as I’ve felt in a long time.” He says this even though it is raining and the Brewers lost.            

At home, my husband goes upstairs to rest and I feed the dog. When I’m done, I search my pockets and the counters for my phone but it is not to be found. My husband comes downstairs. It takes a while for him to make the trip but I know it will be worth it because he always finds my lost things, even phones with their ringers silenced. He finds the phone on the floor next to the kitchen table. Later, when we go to bed, I say, “You know when my phone was lost, I looked in the refrigerator for it.” This feels like a preposterous admission – that I would imagine myself putting my phone in the refrigerator.            

“That’s okay,” my husband says. “I looked in the refrigerator for your phone, too.”            

This is funny. But this is also where we are in our lives. We are, quietly and with good humor, becoming more aware of things changing, simple things getting harder, like walking and finding phones. We are constantly taking care. It is work but also love.            

In the middle of the night, I wake and look out the window, hoping that it is about time for the sun to rise over Lake Michigan and show itself behind the roof of the house across the street. It is not that time. It is dark out except for the street lamp’s soft, dim glow. The dog lays on his old bed, his wolfy head resting on a red pillow. Part of me wants to lay down beside him, like I might if we were somehow caught in a terrible winter storm. He has weathered such storms as a sled dog and knows how. He would curl in a tight ball, his nose tucked under his tail. He would not know how to make a place for me.            

The lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s song “Suzanne” play in my head. I remember listening to his thick, gravelly voice on the radio in my 1978 Toyota, the one I bought just before I met my husband. I was full of longing then, sad for my mistakes, and on the hunt for someone who would let me lead him to a river. A dreamy thing.            

I watch for the sun rising, but it is just four o’clock so it will be a long time looking. I close my eyes thinking about rivers and boats that go by, tea and oranges, and how you might think you have no love to give but you do. It is just different now.            

In the morning, we start over. We ask how we are and we listen to the answers. And then we have coffee and the last of the churros. I peel an orange for us to share.

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Photo by Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash